Our Staff

Director | Technology-enhanced Teaching | Professional Development | General Administration |

Dr Sean MCMINN, Director of CEI

Dr Sean McMinn joined The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in July 2022 as the Director of Center for Education Innovation.

Sean holds a PhD in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning from Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He first joined HKUST in 2005 and had since taken up various teaching and leadership roles in the Center for Language Education (CLE) and School of Humanities and Social Science (SHSS). Sean had been the Academic Director of the Master Program in International Language Education offered by SHSS (2018-2020) and the Associate Director of CLE (2020). He left the University in 2021 and joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as Director of the English Language Centre, where he led over 100 academic and non-academic staff members to support the English language teaching and learning for the University.

Having nearly 20 years’ experience in higher education, Sean has taught a range of subjects, such as Business Communications, EAP, Digital Literacies, and Social Complex Systems, and has interests in educational technology, digital literacies, and networked learning. He won a Teaching Innovation Award for his work with podcasts and education at HKUST in 2007 and has published and presented at international conferences on the subjects of MOOCs, social media and education, and digital literacies.

Technology-enhanced Teaching (eLearning)

The team is dedicated to promoting the use of effective pedagogy and technology in learning and teaching at HKUST. We assisted faculty and teaching staff by:

• offering training on real-time online, mixed-mode teaching, blended learning, as well as guidelines for proctored online exams.
• offering a range of services including project management, instructional design advice, educational video production facilities and support, technological advice, learning analytics and evaluation support for the development of Blended Learning and MOOC.
• collaborating with teaching staff to create customized interactive online content/objects to support their eLearning initiatives.
• providing hands-on training and usage support for institutional eLearning platforms and tools, such as Canvas, Zoom, Turnitin, iPeer and Mentimeter.
• managing and providing support for Coursera for HKUST and the Coursera Partner Consortium to students, alumni and staff.
• exploring and promoting emerging technologies for active learning and teaching, such as in-video quizzing, game-based clickers, AI-proctoring tools, and more.

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Professional Development

The team fosters and advocates innovative pedagogies and best practices in learning and teaching. We support faculty, teaching staff and graduate teaching assistants through the followings:

• provide professional development programs for faculty and teaching staff according to the university’s teaching and learning initiatives, including faculty orientation; university teaching course; seminars and workshops; and annual teaching and learning symposium,
• provide institutional-wide teaching and learning course for all research postgraduates to prepare them for their teaching duties, and to collaborate with Teaching Assistant Coordinators (TAC) to support their departmental graduate teaching assistants,
• support teaching innovations through teaching development grant projects by providing instructional advice and evaluation support, and
• discover and promote the adoption of innovative active learning methods in course design, such as authentic learning through experiential approaches.

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General Administration

The support and services provided by the team range from fielding enquiries, budget administration, logistics arrangement for workshops, seminars and special events, office management, maintaining office supplies, procurement/acquisition, inventory control, administration support for General Education courses and personnel matters to record keeping.

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